


stronger than blood

by WingedFlight



Category: Orphan Black (TV), Sense8 (TV)
Genre: Found Families, Gen, POV Outsider, Walk Into A Bar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-01 20:28:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16291223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WingedFlight/pseuds/WingedFlight
Summary: On a late night in Barcelona, Felix engages in some harmless flirting.





	stronger than blood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ChronicBookworm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChronicBookworm/gifts).



* * *

_ “He’s my brother. Not by something as accidental as blood, but by something much stronger… choice.”  _

_ Wolfgang, Sense8 _

* * *

_One._

“Check out that hot babe,” you say.

It’s late enough that the street outside is darker than the bar, and the neon lights have begun throbbing to a deep double-beat rhythm. Wolfie nods without looking, his eyes focused on the middle-horizon. He isn’t really here at all, you can tell. Typical.

So you jab Wolfie with an elbow to regain his attention, sloshing beer between the two of you, and nod to the woman again. “This trip is exposing me to some real art!”

“Uh huh,” says Wolfie but, by the time he’s turned around, the woman is gone. _His loss,_ you decide, lifting your mug.

Wolfie’s eyes have unfocused again. You lean back against the bar and scan the crowd. This place isn’t nearly as wild as the clubs you’re used to frequenting back home; the dance floor is thin, and the underlying mood of the place is… dull. You catch the eye of a man at the opposite end of the room who’s slouched in the same bored posture and exchange a knowing look.

Wolfie abruptly downs his beer. “Kala’s arriving,” he announces. “See you around ten?”

“I’ll be waiting,” you promise.

And just like that, Wolfie is gone. You finish your own beer and order another, still idly watching those around you. When the man across the bar catches your eye again, you think, _Why the hell not?_

#

The man absolutely isn’t Spanish, that much is obvious even before he opens his mouth. You raise your mug to his and he gives you a “Cheers, mate,” in an accent that’s almost English but not quite.

“Been in town long?” you ask.

“Too long,” says the man with a long-suffering sigh. He raises his own drink and wrinkles his nose at it. “Are you a beer person? My sister left this for me and I am really struggling.”

You tell him, “I will never turn down a drink.”

“I am not opposed to drinking,” he assures you. “I just have… discerning tastes.” And his eyes linger on you longer than they should. “Felix,” he says, and offers his hand.

You cough on your beer, blowing the mood. “No shit! Are you fucking with me?”

“Maybe,” says the other man smoothly. “It depends. Exactly how would this count as fucking?”

So you jab a finger at your own chest. “I am Felix.”

“Now that’s interesting,” he says. “I’ve never… shared drinks with another Felix before.”

#

“I wouldn’t say I’m opposed to visiting Spain,” says other-Felix. “We’ve just been doing a lot of travelling lately, and I’m looking forward to going home. But, you know, my sister--”

“Ah yes. Wolfie, my brother, he dragged me here for a girl.”

“And you came along? Mate, I would have said to him: _run along, have your fun, see you when you’re back and good riddance._ ”

“So your sister isn’t here for love, then?”

“God, no. Work. You really came along to be a third wheel?”

“God, no,” you echo. “She’s not even from here. But she wanted to check something out here in Barcelona and…” You trail off, then finish with an awkward shrug, “Work.”

Felix raises his glass. He’s moved on to wine, now. Classy fucker. “To work.”

You echo his wry tone as you lift your beer. “To work.”

#

As the night deepens, the bar finally comes alive. The music is louder, heavier. The air grows thick and hot. Felix leans closer with every glass, his attention solely for you. _It has been a long time,_ you think, _since I was the center of someone’s world._

You order another beer, and the two of you talk until your head goes black.

* * *

_Two._

To be perfectly honest, you are not surprised to wake up in a strange place with a pounding head. You just thought it would involve a bed, and not a cold metal chair in a dingy concrete basement. And sure, maybe handcuffs aren’t exactly new -- but again, concrete basement. Metal chair. Not ideal.

Your voice, when you call out, is embarrassingly weak. You wince and shout again, louder this time, but no one answers. Your wrists are firmly secured to the chair with the cuffs. So are your ankles. Your pistol and lock-picks are on a folding metal table by the wall.

The only light comes from a flickering bulb overhead, but your hangover is a fairly accurate clock even accounting for the drugs you were probably slipped. It must be well into the morning by now. Normally, you’d have already woken and made your way back to the hotel. Wolfgang will have noticed your absence. Wolfgang will be itching to tear the city apart.

Which means it’s only a matter of time until Wolfie finds whatever hole this is, and then may all the saints and demons help that fucker Felix and whoever he’s working with.

#

“Wake up, sweetheart. It’s time for a chat.”

The headache has gotten worse. Less hangover and more side-effect of the drugs, you think. It’s hard to tell when you don’t know what drug he actually used.

He’s brought another chair into the room, dragging it around to sit on it backwards as though you’ve fallen straight into the interrogation scene of an action thriller. He looks as though he’s done this sort of thing before. You doubt he’ll look as confident when Wolfie comes in guns-first.

You wrinkle your face at him and then ask, “Do you have any pizza?”

“What?”

“Pizza. I’m hungover, I need pizza.”

“You are also tied to a chair,” says Felix.

“Good observation. Now you see why I can’t just go get some pizza for myself.”

You’re wondering if this not-quite-English Felix is more inclined to violence than he looks. After all, he is clearly more adept at kidnapping than appearances led you to believe. There’s a good chance you walk out of here with a bloodied face at the least -- if you can walk out at all.

But Felix just sits. “Alright,” he says. “We’re going to have a quick chat and then you can have all the pizza you like.”

You think about it briefly. “That sounds reasonable.”

“I would like to think I am reasonable, to a degree.” He raises his voice to address someone on the other side of the door. “Fetch us some pizza, would ya?”

#

You tell him everything about all the things he doesn’t want to know.

#

“We know what you’re doing with the Tyndareus Corporation,” Felix reveals at one point. “We saw your brother in there. He’s got access to the lower labs.”

Has he? You hadn’t realized Wolfie and Kala had gotten so far inside. Last night must have gone well for them. As for the rest: “I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t play coy. We know something strange is going on with you lot.”

If _you lot_ means what you’re afraid it means, Felix couldn’t be more right. Wolfie and his cluster are about as strange as it gets. Not that you’d admit as much.

Except your eyes betray you, and Felix latches onto a worrying thread. “Just tell me what your brother’s been up to.”

#

“Let me get this straight,” says Felix again. His shoulders have lowered, his eyes are flatter, and he looks worn out. He may have handled an interrogation or two in his past, but that doesn’t mean he’s good at them. Doesn’t mean he can outlast someone who knows rescue is just a matter of time. “You’re not actually brothers.”

“We’re brothers in every way that counts,” you tell him again. “Brothers in arms. Partners in crime.”

“Partners in crime?”

“Ah. Damn,” you say. “Metaphorical. We haven’t robbed anyone.” Not lately, anyway.

“You mean you’re together.”

“What? No! Would you sleep with your sister?”

“Point taken. So you’re criminal brothers come to Barcelona for work.”

You correct him warily. “For a girl. For Wolfie’s girl.”

But Felix looks a little too satisfied, as though he just got one step closer to whatever truth he’s trying to uncover.

#

The pizza sits on the floor in its cardboard box, cold and untouched at Felix’s side. Your headache has lessened again but damn, hangovers make you hungry. And it’s just mean to put the food in sight but out of reach, even though you know that’s the tactic. Everything’s always a tactic.

Felix is pestering you about all the places his team has seen you and Wolfie since you got to Barcelona, and you’re responding with poetic descriptions of every single piece of architecture you can remember. But your mind is elsewhere. Your mind is still on the pizza, and the moment it was brought into the room -- the moment the door opened and you caught a glimpse of the woman just outside the room as she passed the box to Felix with a low whisper.

You’ve seen the woman before, you’re sure of it. She was the woman from the bar. The hot babe. Except something was different about her.

You wish you knew what that could mean.

Most of the time, you don’t particularly envy Wolfie’s whole sensate situation with all those voices in his head and never a chance for real privacy. But right now, you kind of wish you had a cluster of your own: a Nomi to track you down, a Lito to weave convincing explanations, a Will to pick the cuffs, a Sun to fight towards freedom. But it’s just you, feeling unbearably alone.

Then a roar of gun-fire breaks out overhead and you flash Felix a wild grin.

“Fuck!” he shouts, swinging around toward the door. “Sarah!”

The woman bursts into the room, slamming it behind her. For the first time since the bar, you see her clearly: dark eyes and punk clothes and tangled hair that you could have sworn was in dreads only last night. “They found us,” she says in an accent similar to her brother’s, and darts a concerned look in your direction. You let your smile widen.

These two aren’t armed, aren’t capable of standing against the sheer force of an angry Wolfie. The woman isn’t completely new to guns, judging by the way she grabs your pistol and flicks the safety, but that’s hardly going to help. She aims at the door as Felix scurries to the back wall.

But when the door bursts open, it isn’t Wolfgang. And it isn’t a rescue.

Men in black masks pour into the room, armed to the teeth and brandishing their semi-automatics. The woman sees the futility of your lone pistol and tosses it aside, raising her hands in surrender. There’s a lot of shouting, and both your captors are thrown to the floor, and then there’s the barrel of a gun in your face.

When you look past the weapon, you see the patch on the man’s sleeve depicting a cracked egg: the Tyndareus Corporation.

#

Five minutes later, you’ve been freed from the metal chair in the concrete room, and transferred to a metal bench in the back of a van. Your feet are cuffed to the floor, your wrists chained to a slim metal bar behind you. Other-Felix and his sister Sarah are on the opposite bench, also cuffed, also prisoners.

You don’t think this new situation is any sort of improvement, though it does raise some interesting questions.

“If you’re not with _them,_ ” you hiss, “what the hell did you want with us?”

“If _you’re_ not with them,” counters Felix, “what the hell was your brother doing in their secret labs?”

“Great,” sighs Sarah, looking between the two of you. “Don’t tell me we’re on the same fucking side.”

* * *

_Three._

You’re in the van for a long time, much longer than makes sense. If the Tyndareus soldiers were driving you to their labs in the city, you’d have arrived long before now. Instead, the sounds of city traffic have fallen away, and the vehicle hasn’t turned in a long time. They’re taking you somewhere else.

You hadn’t heard anything about a facility outside Barcelona. This worries you.

With two Tyndareus men in the back of the van with you three, there’s no chance for a private discussion of alliances. Felix compliments one man’s stature, insults the other’s mother, and then complains that all the rough-housing has given him a hangnail. Sarah tries demanding information like who’s in charge and where you’re being taken and what they’ve done with Helena.

“Who’s Helena?” you ask, and then the soldiers are telling you all to shut up and no one talks after that.

You wonder what Wolfgang would do. No, that’s a lie, you know exactly what he would do. He’d taunt the guards until they drew near, and then take them out with a few hard hits, and be out of the restraints before they’d hit the floor. He might not even need his cluster’s help.

But you aren’t Wolfie. You’re just Felix Berner, sidekick. You’ve never been that good at fighting. Your job is to meet people, make connections, find deals, learn secrets. And you haven’t been doing a very good job of even that, lately.

#

The soldiers put a hood over your head before you’re taken from the van. The canvas smells of blood and fear. You shuffle along, the pressure of a gun at your back. You’re terrified the plan is to lead you into a field and then pull the trigger.

But you don’t leave the pavement, and then you stumble over a raised doorway, and then you’re inside. And that’s something, at least.

Forward again, and down some stairs, and through another door. The hoods come off and you blink against the light. The door slams shut before you’ve fully recognized that you’ve been locked inside another concrete room.

“Comfy,” you say, but the others aren’t paying attention. Sarah is already rushing to the corner of this small cell, where a blond-haired girl is curled in a ball.

And Felix, for all the danger he’s in, looks almost relieved. “Hello love,” he says softly.

#

The girl is Helena, and she’s actually Sarah’s age, and she has Sarah’s face. “Twins?” you ask, as if there’s any other sort of explanation. You press on to more important things, “What’s going on? Why do they want you?”

“Now that’s a long story,” says Felix.

“They want our babies,” says Helena bluntly, and in a voice that is decidedly not anything even close to an English accent.

Sarah looks up at you warily, but you can already see where this is leading. You think aloud, “For their experiments. That’s why you’ve been looking into their labs. But -- why Wolfgang and I? Why would you care about us?”

“Because you showed up out of nowhere right when Helena disappeared,” says Sarah.

Felix crosses his arms. “And because you’re both scary German criminals guarding an Indian scientist known for studying genetic mutations.”

“He is not so scary,” mutters Helena.

“I can be scary,” you tell her. “We’re not working with Tyndareus. We’re trying to stop them.”

Helena peers up at you. “You don’t want to experiment on babies?”

You look between the three of them and shake your head. “We don’t want them to experiment on anyone.”

* * *

_Four._

You wake to the scatter-shot sounds of gunfire overhead. Your hand goes to your side to feel the raised scar of a recently-healed bullet-wound, and all you can think is: _It better be Wolfgang this time._

It is.

When the door swings open, you’re poised to fight -- but that isn’t necessary. Your brother fills the doorway, gun dropping to his side as soon as his eyes meet yours. He leaps toward you, grabbing you up in an embrace.

“About time!” you yell. “I thought I was going to be shot again.”

“See?” says Felix behind you. “Scary German criminals. Didn’t I tell you?”

#

The hall outside is littered with the bodies. Wolfie leads the way, his gun drawn, stepping easily over these dead Tyndareus men on his way to the stairs. You pause to select a pistol for yourself, and then toss another to Sarah. She gives you a nod.

You’ve reached the base of the stairs when Wolfie barks, “Left!” for no apparent reason. In response, a gunshot rings out overhead. He lunges up the stairs.

“Left?” asks Felix, but you’re already racing up behind your brother, readying yourself for whatever he’s already seen through another’s eyes.

#

The fight’s over by the time you get there. Three bodies lay at Kala’s feet, and she’s breathing heavy but appears uninjured. Behind her is another Sarah, now with dreadlocks. _This_ is the hot babe from the bar, you realize. You look between these three identical women. “Triplets?”

“They’re clones,” says Kala with a delighted look in her eye.

“Clones,” you repeat.

“Cosima,” says the woman, lifting her hand to wave. Then her gaze shifts to the others behind you. “You found Helena!”

“Reinforcements are coming,” warns Kala. “Two minutes out. We’ve got eyes on them.” Which means it isn’t her saying that at all. Nomi must be watching.

And Cosima, at least, is just as aware of this fact. “They’re connected,” she says. “Think telepathy, but better.” And from the awe in her voice, you could almost swear Kala was speaking through her.

#

There is nothing so cheering as watching a building go up in flames from the flatbed of a rapidly-departing truck. You alternate your attention between the blossoming fire and your new allies: Sarah with her darkly satisfied grin, her hands tightening on the wheel; Helena sticking her head out through the passenger-side window; Felix between the two of them, watching the fire over his shoulder. Everyone else is with you in the back: Cosima and Kala deep in an animated conversation about genetics that may as well be a foreign language; Wolfie opposite Kala, but with a smile on his face makes you think he’s also right beside her, in their way.

You lean back, tired and relieved and also feeling a little bit alone. And you glance forward again into the cab just as Felix’s eyes cut to yours. He raises an eyebrow, and you remember that look first exchanged across a crowded bar when you thought he was just bored and flirty.

This trip has exposed you to some real art, you think, and you give him a smile.

* * *

 


End file.
